Friday, February 15, 2013

Interesting Gender Research

This is the kind of sociological research I find really interesting. Notre Dame Sociologist Elizabeth McClintock did some analysis of gender sex strategies, mentioned by James Taranto at the WSJ:
She made the plausible assumption that the most attractive members of each sex are the ones with the widest range of options, and therefore that their behavior more closely reflects each sex's actual preferences. The corollary is that because less attractive individuals have fewer options, they are under more pressure to compromise and thus their behavior more closely matches the opposite sex's preferences.
So, what did she find?
The better-looking a man is, the more lifetime sexual partners he reports; the better-looking a woman, the fewer. Good-looking men are more likely to have had sex soon after meeting a partner; good-looking women, less likely. Good-looking women are likelier to describe their relationships as "committed"; good-looking men, less likely. 
Very physically attractive women are more likely to form exclusive relationships than to form purely sexual relationships; they are also less likely to have sexual intercourse within the first week of meeting a partner. Presumably, this difference arises because more physically attractive women use their greater power in the partner market to control outcomes within their relationships. For women, the number of sexual partners decreases with increasing physical attractiveness, whereas for men, the number of sexual partners increases with increasing physical attractiveness.
So, when a woman tries to be like a man, or vice versa, it's a low-status move. It's interesting to consider why high status academics recommend such behavior.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

So, physically attractive men go around having sex with ugly women, since physically attractive women have so few partners.

Anonymous said...

Not really surprising, human sexual organization is (and has always been) polygynous. This is why there is greater variation in male fitness than in female fitness, for example.

Norman Conquest said...

"So, physically attractive men go around having sex with ugly women, since physically attractive women have so few partners"

Or they are having it with attractive men who are fewer in number. Attractive men will bed women who are average and above. Attractive women stick to the rightmost part of the curve.

It's a guess that women, though different in attractiveness, have a similar experience in that they can find a man of some sort with relative ease. Attractive men have a radically different experience than homely men. Women see them almost as different species. The pious man simply has no traction with women. If he had options he would take them. Period.

"if G0d made something better than pussy he's keeping it for himself" - M. Tyson

Alrighty then

Anonymous said...

Well, every guy knows that If you absolutely, must get laid tonight, hit on a frumpy chick. Just make sure to wrap up.



Norman Conquest said...

Rubbers get in the way of a proper rogering. If some poor chippy gets knocked up she can always rook a beta into paying the freight.

Anonymous said...

If the people who advocate feminism are low status, it stands to reason that the people who bitch about the feminists are broken slaves.

Happy Birthday said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Happy Birthday said...

the most prolific and influential academics aren't physically attractive (way lower mean, way fewer 'highly attractive' players) and lack bargaining power in the sexual marketplace. they make the necessary compromises to secure a partner and then tell themselves that those compromises are, after all, what one really ought to do when one really thinks about it. they tell others to do as they do because that's what everyone does.

mystery solved!

zby said...

It is not explicitly pronounced in your blog post - but it somehow hides under the surface that this is about 'the true self of women' - this interpretation is absurd - it is like making stats about how many partners a man has from each gender and then interpreting the mean as 'the true sexual self of men'.

Mercury said...

I don’t know…this looks an awful lot like common sense repackaged as ground-breaking research by academics so smart they couldn’t figure out how to get laid in a whore house with a fist full of hundred dollar bills. Men place greater priority on X, women on Y. Those in both groups with inherent advantages tend to be price setters not price takers. Physical attractiveness and status are big but not the only important factors involved in (permanent) mate selection so typically you see a lot of likes ending up with likes….although I would say that the more successful marriages are characterized not simply by attribute matching (the e-harmony approach) but by a meshing of neurosis (my working, technical definition of love).

I don’t think the dynamics of the marriage market can be so “easily extended” to the pre-marital sex market because they are different games. The marriage market is about choosing the best position to be long before the market closes (forever!) with the understanding that any future, offsetting transaction will be prohibitively expensive (I’m such a romantic). But in the pre-marital sex market sex tends to be more of a means to an end for women and a desired outcome for men. Both men and women are transacting in the same market but women tend to be investors looking for the ultimate buy and hold while men tend to be traders happy to endure additional frictional costs for…ah…additional friction. A quick in-and-out of a position at a small loss is considered a big win. Typically, by accident or design, men ultimately end up with one of those trades on (between) the sheets that turns into an investment.

What would be more interesting is an extensive study which examines how government incentives affect market dynamics in these areas:

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/05/03/Julia-President-Obama-forever

RPB said...

Nice work Mercury, hilarious

Fish Goldstein said...

This is why it is recommended to cater to the opposite sex: If you aren't very attractive, acting like you are will yield sub-optimal earnings.

That said, there is some signalling going on. If you act like an attractive man, women might be fooled into believing you are one.

Norman Conquest said...

Mr. Young hits the nail on the head. I think we can extend his idea to include the least prolific and influential.

Thank you Mercury. I like how you handle your business.

And Mr. Goldstein teaches us an important life lesson: don't sniff glue. That stuff will rot your brain posthaste.

Good talk.